¹ See, for example, the essays by Joseph A. Camilleri, ‘Rethinking Sovereignty in a Shrinking, Fragmented World’, and Bateson, Mary Catherine, ‘Beyond Sovereignty: An Emerging Global Civilization’, both in Walker, R. B. J. and Mendlovitz, S. H. (eds.), Contending Sovereignties: Redefining Political Community (Boulder, 1990), pp. 13–44Google Scholar and 145–58.

² See, for example, the varying indictments of sovereignty by Elshtain, Jean Bethke, ‘Identity, Sacrifice, and Sovereignty’, Social Research, 58 (1991), pp. 545–64Google Scholar; Beitz, Charles, ‘Sovereignty and Morality in International Affairs’, in Held, D. (ed.), Political Theory Today (Stanford, 1991), p. 243Google Scholar; Falk, Richard, Human Rights and State Sovereignty (New York, 1981)Google Scholar; and Weber, Cynthia, ‘Reconstructing Statehood: Examining the Sovereignty/Intervention Boundary’, Review of International Studies, 18 (1992), pp. 199–216CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³ R. B. J. Walker identifies these contradictory responses as reflections of a paradox at the heart of the concept and practice of sovereignty. See Walker, ‘Sovereignty, Identity, Community: Reflections on the Horizons of Contemporary Political Practice’, in R. B. J. Walker and Saul H. Mendlovitz (eds.), Contending Sovereignties, pp. 159–85. We follow his lead, but give our own characterization of that paradox.

⁴ On the role claims of sovereignty have played in the Third World's demands, see Bull, Hedley, ‘The Revolt Against the West’, in Bull, H. and Watson, A. (eds.), The Expansion of International Society (Oxford, 1984), pp. 217–28Google Scholar and Blaney, David L., ‘Equal Sovereignty and an African Statehood: Tragic Elements in the African Agenda in World Affairs’, in Cottam, M. and Shih, C.-Y. (eds.), Contending Dramas: A Cognitive Approach to Post- War International Organization (New York, 1992), pp. 211–26Google Scholar.

⁵ The idea that sovereignty is an appropriate object of political economy might be greeted with scepticism by proponents of a more conventional international relations theory. We would note that Kenneth Waltz's neo-realism, with its market metaphor (drawn from neo-classical economics) is itself a ‘political economy’ of the state. We owe this phrasing to an anonymous reviewer.

⁶ Marx, Karl, Capital: Volume I (New York, 1977), p. 280Google Scholar.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Marx, Karl, Grundrisse (New York, 1973), p. 245Google Scholar.

⁹ Marx, Grundrisse, p. 247.

¹⁰ See David. L. Blaney, ‘Individual, Class, and Communism: The Self and Marx's Social and Political Theory’, PhD thesis, University of Denver, 1990, chapter 1.

¹¹ Marx, Grundrisse, p. 158. Carol Gould makes this passage the centre of her interpretation of the Grundrisse. See Gould, Carol C., Marx's Social Ontology: Individuality and Community in Marx's Theory of Social Reality (Cambridge, 1978)Google Scholar.

¹² Marx, Grundrisse, p. 158.

¹³ Grundrisse, pp. 472 and 474.

¹⁴ Grundrisse, pp.472–3.

¹⁵ Grundrisse, p. 245.

¹⁶ Grundrisse, pp. 507–8.

¹⁷ See Grundrisse, pp. 471, 485, 489, 495–96.

¹⁸ Grundrisse, pp. 247–8, 512–13.

¹⁹ Grundrisse, p. 488.

²⁰ Grundrisse, p. 325.

²¹ Grundrisse, p. 488

²² Smith's acceptance of the demarcations of boundaries central to sovereignty and the society of states is consistent with the practice of the classical political economy tradition.

²³ See Naeem Inayatullah, Towards an Ethical Basis for Political Economy’, manuscript in preparation.

²⁴ Smith, Adam, The Wealth of Nations (Chicago, 1976), p. 8Google Scholar.

²⁵ Smith, Wealth, p. 8.

²⁶ Smith establishes the necessity of these social relations in a backward and mostly implicit manner. In Book II, the creation of wealth through the division of labour does not originate from its opposite, poverty. Rather, the creation of wealth requires for its generation an already abundant condition, in which prior ‘stocks’ are bifurcated into ‘capital’ and ‘stock’. The latter is only sufficient to sustain an individual for a short time, compelling that individual into the status of a labourer. The former is sufficient to establish a workshop and hire labourers, the creation of a social space in which the division of labour might be practised. This is not to mention the additional ‘capital’ smuggled into the example by Smith. See Naeem Inayatullah, ‘Deepening IR Theory's Dependence on Adam Smith: Old Texts, New Readings’ (manuscript, 1992) and ‘Ethical Basis for Political Economy’.

²⁷ Smith, Wealth, p. 15.

²⁸ Smith's answer about the distribution of wealth in other chapters does not concern us here, for we are interested in contrasting principles of wealth acquisition implicit in Smith's account at this point in his argument-a point at which societal and individual wealth are supposedly joined. Smith's privileging of a labour theory of value later in the text does not obviate this tension in chapter 1.

²⁹ Smith's greater sensitivity to the social relations of capitalism in Book II of Wealth should not obscure his employment of the independent artisan in Book I. Nor should we ignore the implications of this confusion-inadvertantly introducing competing principles of wealth acquisition and silence on questions about the principles governing access to wealth. It is interesting to note that commentators often fail to read Book II very carefully, ignoring its implicit class argument, and they rarely attempt to integrate the two sections of this work. See Levine, David P., Economic Studies: Contributions to the Critique of Economic Theory (London, 1977)Google Scholar, chapter 2, and Inayatullah, ‘Deepening IR Theory’.

³⁰ James, Alan, Sovereign Statehood (London, 1986)Google Scholar, chapter 1. Especially sensitive to the problems of sovereignty as concept and social practice is the work of R. B. J. Walker and Richard K. Ashley. See Walker, , ‘Sovereignty, Identity, Community’, ‘State Sovereignty and the Articulation of Political Space/Time’, Millennium 20 (1991), pp. 445–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Security, Sovereignty, and the Challenge of World Polities’, Alternatives, XV (1990), pp. 3–27Google Scholar. See Ashley, , ‘Untying the Sovereign State: A Double Reading of the Anarchy Problematique’, Millennium 17 (1988), pp. 227–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³¹ Hinsley's, Sovereignty, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1986)Google Scholar remains the most important effort to explain, date, and conceptualize sovereignty.

³² Hinsley, Sovereignty, p. 26.

³³ Hinsley traces meticulously the evolution of the relation between state and community which makes possible claims of sovereignty and has been the basis for continuing debate about the precise location of the final authority within the community-a debate eventuating in the doctrine of popular sovereignty, by his account. See, especially, Sovereignty, chapters I and VI.

³⁴ Hinsley, Sovereignty, p. 158.

³⁵ See Bull, Hedley, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics (New York, 1977), p. 8CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Wight, Martin, Systems of States (Leicester, 1977), p. 153Google Scholar. Of recent note is R. B. J. Walker's argument that sovereignty not only divides the inside from the outside, but also shapes the character of the community and relations of communities. Walker, ‘Sovereignty, Identity, Community’. However, despite the general support this idea receives in the literature, Charles Beitz, ‘Sovereignty and Morality’, disputes this characterization of the relation of internal and external sovereignty.

³⁶ We borrow this language from Hedley Bull, Anarchical Society. Bull differentiates between a system of states and a society of states. The former is merely reactive; states take each other's presence into consideration when planning. The latter involves communicating intentions, establishing rules, and participating in institutions.

³⁷ Hinsley, Sovereignty, p. 158. See also Martin Wight, Systems of State, p. 135.

³⁸ Our analysis parallels the work of Wendt, Alexander, ‘Anarchy is What States Make of it: The Social Construction of Power Polities’, International Organization, 46 (1992), pp. 392–425CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁹ Robert H. Jackson makes a similar point, ‘Defending the national interest makes sense only if that interest entails real value: the state being defended must give or at least be assumed to give expression to the good life’. ‘Martin Wight, International Theory and the Good Life’, Millennium, 19 (1990), p. 266Google Scholar. Despite this wording, we do not endorse the idea that communities are necessarily homogeneous and fully integrated, fixing on a single idea of the good life. Rather, we have argued elsewhere that communities are characterized by competing, both dominant and recessive, visions of the good. The relative unity of a community must be forged (or imagined) in relation to this difference. See Blaney, David L. and Inayatullah, Naeem, ‘Prelude to a Conversation of Cultures in International Society? : Todorov and Nandy on the Possibility of Dialogue’, Alternatives, 19 (1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁰ See Levine, David P., Economic Theory, Volume 1 (Boston, 1978), pp. 168–81Google Scholar.

⁴¹ This is precisely the claim made by Strange, Susan, ‘States, Firms and Diplomacy’, International Affairs, 68 (1992), pp. 1–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴² See Ruggie, John Gerald, ‘International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order’, in Krasner, S. (ed.), International Regimes (Ithaca, 1983), pp. 195–231Google Scholar.

⁴³ Nothing about this claim denies the ‘interdependence’ of states. Rather, the terminology of interdependence presumes the existential separateness of states which is moderated by transboundary transactions of various sorts. Thus, no one denies that ‘self-help’ is the rule of an interdependent world.

⁴⁴ Beitz, ‘Sovereignty and Morality’, p. 243.

⁴⁵ The Third World in its demands for a New International Economic Order has appealed to sovereignty as a principle justifying various reforms, although not always in a consistent fashion. See the references in note 4. For arguments about the tensions in the Third World demands, see Schachter, Oscar, ‘Sharing the World's Resources’, in Falk, R., Kratochwil, F., Mendlovitz, S. H. (eds.), International Law: A Contemporary Perspective (Boulder, 1985), pp. 525–46Google Scholar, and David L. Blaney, ‘The Difference Dependency Theory Makes’ (manuscript, 1993).

⁴⁶ The result resembles more the idea of a suzerainty than an ‘anarchical society’, to invoke Bull once again. See Anarchical Society, pp. 10–11.

⁴⁷ We are not very clear here about how such a right would be implemented. What is clear is that adopting such a social principle of wealth acquisition requires that its implementation be a social process.

⁴⁸ See Blaney, ‘Dependency Theory’.

⁴⁹ Herz, John H., International Politics in the Atomic Age (New York, 1959), p. 40Google Scholar.

⁵⁰ Ashley, Richard K., ‘Living on the Border Lines: Man, Poststructuralism, and War’, in Der Derian, J. and Shapiro, M. J. (eds.), International/Intertextual Relations: Postmodern Readings of World Politics (Lexington, MA, 1989), p. 309Google Scholar.

⁵¹ See the interesting work on the historical evolution of the meaning and function of boundaries by Kratochwil, Friedrich. ‘Of Systems, Boundaries, and Territoriality: An Inquiry into the Formation of the State System’, World Politics, XXXIX (1986), pp. 27–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵² See the overview of this issue by Ashley, ‘Untying the Sovereign State’, and Jervis, Robert, ‘Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma’, World Politics, XXX (1978), pp. 167–214CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵³ Herz, John H., ‘Idealist Internationalism and the Security Dilemma’, World Politics, II (1950), p. 157CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵⁴ Herz, ‘Idealist Internationalism, p. 157.

⁵⁵ Herz, International Politics, pp. 13 and 40.

⁵⁶ International Politics, p. 41.

⁵⁷ International Politics, pp. 61, 71–5.

⁵⁸ See Levine, David P., The Fortress and the Market (manuscript, 1991), pp. 74–6Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ Herz, John H., ‘The Territorial State Revisited: Reflections on the Future of the Nation-State’, Polity, 1 (1968), pp. 11–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁰ Blaney and Inayatullah, ‘Prelude to a Conversation of Cultures’. See also Nandy, Ashis, Traditions, Tyranny and Utopias (Delhi, Oxford, 1987).Google Scholar

⁶¹ Levine, Fortress and Market, p. 39.